Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-12-Speech-2-118"
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"en.20001212.6.2-118"2
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"Mr President, I apologise because my remarks are slightly ill-prepared. I have come straight from a meeting and, because there are no televisions in the meeting rooms in this building, it is very difficult to keep in touch with what is happening in the Chamber, a deficiency which I hope will be corrected in due course.
Many of us regard the Treaty of Nice as unacceptable but for many different reasons. The great difficulty concerning the Treaty of Nice – as many people have already commented – is that the lack of any text at this time makes it impossible to make a considered judgment. We do not know whether the carpentry shop in Nice has produced a Pandora's box for Commission activism or a coffin for democracy, but – whatever has emerged – it is being French-polished and we hope the final result helps the European Union.
I believe that two failures are the lack of democracy, because the opportunity to open the Council up to public scrutiny has been ignored although many of us feel that this was the time to do it, and the illogicality of the re-weighting of votes, with one approach for the Council and another for the European Parliament. Many people looking at the Treaty of Nice will wonder why it was done in that way. I personally believe that the re-weighting of votes must take account of population, as is done in the European Parliament and should have been done in the Council also.
A further reason for opposing the Treaty of Nice is the development of greater bureaucracy in the European Union. Who can genuinely argue that the thirty areas now under QMV are essential to the enlargement process? I think most of the enlargement countries – while accepting the Treaty as it stands because it exists and opens the door to their accession in due course, sooner rather than later I hope – will look at those points and, like most of us, realise that they have no relevance to the day-to-day affairs of their lives. No reform of the common agricultural policy, no reform of the development policies which are vastly wasteful. Then there is the incorporation as a mandatory mechanism of the Charter of Fundamental Rights: in itself as in the United States today, a recipe for confusion between the courts in the European Union. There is the fact that under enhanced cooperation the European Parliament has no role, although certain leaders of national parties – including the leader of the Labour Party in his Warsaw speech – promised no reform of the structural funds in real terms until 2013. This is not a recipe for enlargement, it is a recipe for more bureaucracy, less democracy."@en1
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